Perspectives on Ethics of AI

2020 ◽  
pp. 537-553
Author(s):  
David J. Gunkel
Keyword(s):  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
Human Action ◽  
Moral Standing ◽  
Machine Ethics ◽  
Social Actor ◽  
Moral Machines ◽  
Alternative Approach ◽  
The Status ◽  
Ai Ethics

This chapter investigates the philosophical aspects of AI and ethics. As the world today becomes increasingly populated by intelligent, socially interactive artefacts—devices that are not just instruments of human action but designed to be a kind of social actor in their own right—people will need to grapple with challenging questions concerning the status and moral standing of these machinic others. In formulating responses to these questions, one can obviously deploy the standard properties approach. This method has considerable historical precedent behind it and constitutes what can be called the default setting for addressing questions concerning moral standing. Indeed, a good deal of the current work in moral machines, machine ethics, AI ethics, and the ethics of AI follow this procedure. However, this approach, for all its advantages, also has considerable difficulties. The chapter therefore proposes an alternative approach to addressing AI ethics and the ethics of AI that circumvents many of the problems encountered in the properties approach by arranging for an ethics that is relational, radically empirical, and altruistic. This other way of thinking is informed by and follows from recent innovations in moral philosophy.

Self and Selves

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ralph C.S. Walker
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
A Priori ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Synthetic A Priori

Kant is committed to the reality of a subject self, outside time but active in forming experience. Timeless activity is problematic, but that can be dealt with. But he holds that the subject of experience is not an object of experience, so nothing can be known about it; this raises a problem about the status of his own theory. But he ought to allow that we can know of its existence and activity, as preconditions of experience: the Critique allows that synthetic a priori truths can be known in this way. However, its identity conditions remain unknowable. Kant’s unity of apperception shares much with Locke’s continuity of consciousness, but does not determine the identity of a thing. Personal identity is bodily identity. Only Kant’s moral philosophy justifies recognizing other selves; it could warrant ascribing a similar status to animals.

scholarly journals Verbesserte Finanzbedarfsmessung im nordrhein-westfälischen Finanzausgleich und ihre Verteilungswirkungen

2018 ◽  
Vol 67 (2) ◽  
pp. 189-218
Author(s):  
Thomas Brenner ◽  
Thomas Döring
Keyword(s):  
Robust Regression ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Recent Past ◽  
Time Stability ◽  
Fiscal Equalization ◽  
Alternative Approach ◽  
Parameter Variations ◽  
Regression Approach ◽  
The Status ◽  
Fiscal Equalization System

Abstract Within the local fiscal equalization system of North Rhine-Westphalia, anticipated financial needs of municipalities are estimated by the use of regression analysis. In the recent past the previously exercised regression approach shows unexpected results concerning the main parameters determining intra-system allocation of general grants. Against this background the paper analyses the reasons for these parameter variations in order to identify an alternative approach to achieve regression results with higher accuracy and time stability both of which are of particular importance from a fiscal equalization policy perspective. It will be shown that the so-called robust regression is such an alternative method which leads – in case of its implementation – to divergent distributional effects compared to the status quo.

Karl Barth's Moral Thought

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerald McKenny
Keyword(s):  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Human Action ◽  
Theological Ethics ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Moral Norms ◽  
Moral Good ◽  
Moral Thought ◽  
Form Of Life ◽  
God's Grace ◽  
The Right

Does theological ethics articulate moral norms with the assistance of moral philosophy? Or does it leave that task to moral philosophy alone while it describes a distinctively Christian way of acting or form of life? These questions lie at the heart of theological ethics as a discipline. Karl Barth’s theological ethics makes a strong case for the first alternative. This book follows Barth’s efforts to present God’s grace as a moral norm in his treatments of divine commands, moral reasoning, responsibility, and agency. It shows how Barth’s conviction that grace is the norm of human action generates problems for his ethics at nearly every turn, as it involves a moral good that confronts human beings from outside rather than perfecting them as the kind of creature they are. Yet it defends Barth’s insistence on the right of theology to articulate moral norms, and it shows how Barth may lead theological ethics to exercise that right in a more compelling way than he did.

Action

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Hornsby
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Action Theory ◽  
Human Action ◽  
Human Freedom ◽  
Detailed Account ◽  
Legal Philosophy ◽  
Philosophical Study ◽  
General Account ◽  
The Status ◽  
Freedom And Responsibility

Philosophical study of human action owes its importance to concerns of two sorts. There are concerns addressed in metaphysics and philosophy of mind about the status of reasoning beings who make their impact in the natural causal world, and concerns addressed in ethics and legal philosophy about human freedom and responsibility. ‘Action theory’ springs from concerns of both sorts; but in the first instance it attempts only to provide a detailed account that may help with answering the metaphysical questions. Action theorists usually start by asking ‘How are actions distinguished from other events?’. For there to be an action, a person has to do something. But the ordinary ‘do something’ does not capture just the actions, since we can say (for instance) that breathing is something that everyone does, although we don’t think that breathing in the ordinary way is an action. It seems that purposiveness has to be introduced – that someone’s intentionally doing something is required. People often do the things they intentionally do by moving bits of their bodies. This has led to the idea that ‘actions are bodily movements’. The force of the idea may be appreciated by thinking about what is involved in doing one thing by doing another. A man piloting a plane might have shut down the engines by depressing a lever, for example; and there is only one action here if the depressing of the lever was (identical with) the shutting down of the engines. It is when identities of this sort are accepted that an action may be seen as an event of a person’s moving their body: the pilot’s depressing of the lever was (also) his moving of his arm, because he depressed the lever by moving his arm. But how do bodies’ movings – such events now as his arm’s moving – relate to actions? According to one traditional empiricist account, these are caused by volitions when there are actions, and a volition and a body’s moving are alike parts of the action. But there are many rival accounts of the causes and parts of actions and of movements. And volitional notions feature not only in a general account of the events surrounding actions, but also in accounts that aim to accommodate the experience that is characteristic of agency.

Why Thomas Reid Matters to the Epistemology of the Social Sciences

2019 ◽  
Vol 70 (279) ◽  
pp. 282-301
Author(s):  
Laurent Jaffro ◽  
Vinícius França Freitas
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Action ◽  
First Principles ◽  
Explanatory Power ◽  
Human Action ◽  
Human Knowledge ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Reasoning ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Mind

Abstract Little attention has been paid to the fact that Thomas Reid's epistemology applies to ‘political reasoning’ as well as to various operations of the mind. Reid was interested in identifying the ‘first principles’ of political science as he did with other domains of human knowledge. This raises the question of the extent to which the study of human action falls within the competence of ‘common sense’. Our aim is to reconstruct and assess Reid's epistemology of the sciences of social action and to determine how it connects with the fundamental tenets of his general epistemology. In the first part, we portray Reid as a methodological individualist and focus on the status of the first principles of political reasoning. The second part examines Reid's views on the explanatory power of the principles of human action. Finally, we draw a parallel between Reid's epistemology and the methodology of Weberian sociology.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) Ethics

2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 74-87 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keng Siau ◽  
Weiyu Wang
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Data Privacy ◽  
Ethical Issues ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Critical Issue ◽  
Ethical Principles ◽  
Machine Ethics ◽  
Moral Issues ◽  
Ai Ethics ◽  
Self Driving Cars

Artificial intelligence (AI)-based technology has achieved many great things, such as facial recognition, medical diagnosis, and self-driving cars. AI promises enormous benefits for economic growth, social development, as well as human well-being and safety improvement. However, the low-level of explainability, data biases, data security, data privacy, and ethical problems of AI-based technology pose significant risks for users, developers, humanity, and societies. As AI advances, one critical issue is how to address the ethical and moral challenges associated with AI. Even though the concept of “machine ethics” was proposed around 2006, AI ethics is still in the infancy stage. AI ethics is the field related to the study of ethical issues in AI. To address AI ethics, one needs to consider the ethics of AI and how to build ethical AI. Ethics of AI studies the ethical principles, rules, guidelines, policies, and regulations that are related to AI. Ethical AI is an AI that performs and behaves ethically. One must recognize and understand the potential ethical and moral issues that may be caused by AI to formulate the necessary ethical principles, rules, guidelines, policies, and regulations for AI (i.e., Ethics of AI). With the appropriate ethics of AI, one can then build AI that exhibits ethical behavior (i.e., Ethical AI). This paper will discuss AI ethics by looking at the ethics of AI and ethical AI. What are the perceived ethical and moral issues with AI? What are the general and common ethical principles, rules, guidelines, policies, and regulations that can resolve or at least attenuate these ethical and moral issues with AI? What are some of the necessary features and characteristics of an ethical AI? How to adhere to the ethics of AI to build ethical AI?

Poetry and Equity: Aristotle's Defense of Fiction

Traditio ◽  
1982 ◽  
Vol 38 ◽  
pp. 17-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathy Eden
Keyword(s):  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Human Action ◽  
Nicomachean Ethics ◽  
Direct Response ◽  
Ethical Action ◽  
Legal Code ◽  
Legal Case ◽  
Literary Arts ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Ethical Presuppositions

Reading the Poetics in light of Aristotle's most complete statements of equity in the Nicomachean Ethics and the Rhetoric, this essay undertakes to demonstrate how and why Aristotle develops an art of poetry within the context of a science of ethics. It seeks to show, that is, how in direct response to Plato's epistemological and ethical objections to tragedy, Aristotle's argument for the preservation of the literary arts follows from a fundamental conviction that poetry shares not only its object of inquiry but also its method of inquiry with the ethical and legal sciences. Like moral philosophy or ethics, tragedy investigates human action. To this end, it relies on the mechanism of ‘fiction’ (πoíησις), which clearly emerges in the course of the Poetics as the literary counterpart to ‘equity’ in the disciplines of ethics and law. As logical constructs, both fiction and equity are designed to qualify ethical action by negotiating between universal propositions — the general ethical presuppositions of the poet's audience or the advocate's legal code — and particular circumstances — the details of the plot or the events of the individual legal case.

Ryoki Ikeda and the Prioritising of Space over Time in Musical Discourse

2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 378-384
Author(s):  
Adam Collis
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Music ◽  
Sound Art ◽  
Music Practice ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Broadband Spectrum ◽  
Alternative Approach ◽  
Musical Discourse ◽  
The Status ◽  
Nature Of Time ◽  
Over Time

No art form so rigorously organises time as music. Whereas all art in some sense exists in time, music could be said to be of time. This article, however, questions implicit assumptions about the fundamental nature of time to music. In contrast, an alternative approach to the discourse of composition and analysis is proposed in which space rather than time is privileged. Russolo, Stockhausen, Cage and Agostino Di Scipio are cited as historical precedents where the status of time in music is questioned but a more detailed consideration is given to Ryoji Ikeda, a contemporary sound-art practitioner who, it is argued, represents a turn towards the privileging of space in contemporary music practice. This article argues that an approach to composition that implicitly accepts the primacy of time tends to privilege sounds that are more easily described symbolically, such as notated pitched sounds or materials with clear spectromorphological design. In contrast, an approach that places greater concern with the work in space facilitates the greater use of materials that could be considered ‘noise’, in the sense of both a broadband spectrum and signal disruption.

The status of machine ethics: a report from the AAAI Symposium

2007 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Anderson ◽  
Susan Leigh Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Machine Ethics ◽  
The Status

Sustainability and the Civil Commons: Rural Communities in the Age of Globalization

2006 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 965-966
Author(s):  
Roger Epp
Keyword(s):  
Rural Communities ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
Creative Class ◽  
Social Infrastructure ◽  
Think Tank ◽  
Commodity Trade ◽  
University Of Toronto ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Status ◽  
Civil Commons

Sustainability and the Civil Commons: Rural Communities in the Age of Globalization, Jennifer Sumner, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005, pp. viii, 179.As we are continually reminded, Canada is now an overwhelmingly urban country. Mythic vastness notwithstanding, most of its people and certainly its mobile “creative class,” presumed driver of the knowledge economy, live in major cities, whose policy requirements have captured a good deal of national attention in the past decade. By contrast, rural Canada has been reduced to the status of the space in-between. Its resource-based communities and livelihoods—farming, fishing, forestry—live with the downward price pressures of global commodity trade as well as the most intractable trade disruptions. Its public services and social infrastructure have been diminished. Aside from pretty places that have become recreational or residential enclaves, its population typically is declining and aging. Its widespread sense of abandonment so far has generated only inchoate, perhaps incoherent political responses. Meanwhile, the growing consensus among newspaper editorialists and think-tank policy specialists is that “dependent” and “unsustainable” rural Canada has been subsidized long enough for sentimental reasons at the expense of real needs elsewhere.

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